10.3 / May & June 2015

Isn’t it always like this? At the start it’s chocolates, then a 15-carat ring and you’re locked in: what will your Future bring? Turns out, a baby and a broken heart.

Let feathers fall as they’ll fly: On the moon, like stone. In water, they sway, reflected

W. thought her husband had always been great in bed. He knew just how to touch her.

In dreams, I never get to say the rest (it’s drawn to moon, swallows men whole).

At night back then we would go to the B&I, a large discount department store with a fake, plywood circus tent built across the front of the building.

According to her customer service representative, the earliest a Comcast (CMCSA 56.77 ↑ 0.77) customer support technician could be dispatched to repair her television service was Tuesday, December 23rd, between the hours of 10 AM and 2 PM, would this repair window work for Theresa? No, Gopika, it would not.

My grandfather is used to smog, the days so humid heat curls off the pavement like smoke.

“I want to tell you something, Fi-fi,” she says, leaning in and over, her cinnamon breath on my face, and the peaks of her new breasts visible under my Miley Cyrus tank top which will never be the same. It’s a tiny bathroom.

I. You first meet the ornithologist at the arboretum, in the shade of the hummingbird garden, on a warm desert spring day. The hummingbirds whir above your head. They are iridescent bullets; they chase each other, perch briefly on the red feeders only to be chased off again, then replaced. Thin, metallic whistles.

In the library’s sunless depths, endangered miniscule fish, each a single scale of crystalline flesh, cling to the hungry body of our past, feed on forgotten thought.

With its own mind my tongue wants to love the hygienist’s tiny picks I milk the rest of my sure insurance to have a bite splint made (for I am going out into a place where there will be gnashing of teeth) the hygienist asks if I’ve started on my Great American Novel and I’m

southern summers sleep on the surface of our skin humidity singing here is the church here is the steeple we keep opening things that were never closed to begin with like the mouth you know kissing is just a desire to smell the pheromones on the neck like how a performance artist asphyxiated in the dumpster and immediately began decomposing of course

Fred had been fooling with dimplechin homecoming king Pat Martin since, he claimed, eighth grade, but he had never had done to him what he let Levi Weaver do.

Course Contents is a collage poem made from images and texts taken from a two volume binder set of a 1960’s charm school teacher. Her 9 week class divided into 6 lessons: make-up, wardrobe, figure control, visual poise, personality, and voice.

There is a teeny tiny dead mouse on the back porch. He died about three days ago and looks corpsier every time I pass by. Days are long, life is long, everything is destined to decay, et cetera.